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I have more info on this here:http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=25915.0
MELBURNIANS could soon be subject to tough new daily water limits under a State Government plan to curb use.
Due to ongoing dry weather, Stage 3a water restrictions have been in effect since 1 April 2007. http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=120&pg=997
Cross Currents In Water WorldJocelynn Drake, Option Advisor 06.19.08, 6:00 PM ETIt surrounds us, fills us and we are entirely dependent upon it for our survival, yet water is probably one of the most overlooked sectors within the market.The ISE Water Index (HHO) has enjoyed an impressive rally this year, while the world remains focused on the rising price of crude oil and the flagging performance of the dollar. The ISE Water Index is composed of companies engaged in water distribution, water filtration, flow technology and other water solutions. The index has tacked on nearly 5% since the start of 2008, easily outpacing the S&P 500 Index's (SPX) loss of 7.7% during the same time frame.Click here to download "Energy Bull Market: Six Must-Own Stocks."The ISE Water Index has been buoyed by solid support from its ascending 10- and 20-day moving averages for most of 2008 and is now hovering close to its all-time high of 95.19. In fact, the index has climbed steadily higher since it was created in January 2006, gaining more than 36% along the way.One company definitely worth watching within the ISE Water Index is Flowserve. The company makes pumps, valves and mechanical seals, and it is the world's largest provider of pumps for the chemical, petroleum and power industries, selling its products and services to more than 10,000 customers around the globe.Special Offer: How high will Potash Saskatchewan (POT) climb? Should you still be a bull on fertilizer stocks--or is the bullish case a bunch of manure? How about gold--is that party over? Click here for daily recommended trades in Bernie Schaeffer's Option Advisor.Flowserve shares have been in a strong uptrend since late January and have gained roughly 40% since the beginning of 2008, climbing along the support of their ascending 10- and 20-day moving averages. But this is just a small part of the security's long-term uptrend that started in March 2007. The equity is currently consolidating into support at its 10-week moving average, which it could use as a springboard to launch it higher.However, investors are quite skeptical of the shares. The Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) stands at 1.27, as put open interest easily outweighs call open interest among June and July options. This preference for put options indicates that investors aren't expecting the shares to rally much higher during the near term. What's more, this ratio is higher than 89% of all those taken during the past 52 weeks. In other words, short-term speculators have been more pessimistically aligned just 11% of the time during the past year.Furthermore, Wall Street has yet to jump on this outperforming security. According to Zacks, only four brokerage firms following the firm and not one of these gives it a "buy" rating. Any upgrades and/or fresh coverage from the various brokerage firms could help to give the shares a boost. To take advantage of a rally in the shares, investors should consider the stock's July 135 call.Special Offer: Profit as stocks go up and go down. Although it can be nerve-racking, you can make money on price declines if you own puts. Which stocks and ETFs are most likely to slip most? Financials? Tech? Fertilizers? Click here for recommended trades with a 30-day free trial of Option Advisor.Another strong security within the HHO is Danaher. The company has a professional instrumentation group that produces environmental and electronic testing technology. It offers product identification equipment and consumables; motion, position, speed, temperature, level instruments and sensing devices; liquid flow and quality measuring devices; aerospace safety devices and defense articles; and electronic and mechanical counting and controlling devices.Since mid-March, Danaher has trekked higher, creating a series of higher lows. What's more, the stock has reclaimed the 80-level, which is also home to the security's rising 10-month moving average. The trend line has carried the stock higher during the past several years along with its 20-month trend line. It appears that the shares are now poised to resume their long-term uptrend.Much like Flowserve, options players have taken a bearish stance toward Danaher. The put/call open interest ratio for the security stands at 1.03, as put open interest outweighs call open interest. This ratio is also higher than 83% of all those taken during the past 52 weeks. Meanwhile, six of the 17 analysts following DHR rate it a "hold," leaving the door open for potential upgrades. A July 80 call would allow a trader to benefit from a bounce off support at the stock's long-term support.Not all is well in water world. Aqua America is a utility holding company that provides water and wastewater services through its operating subsidiaries to about 2.8 million residents in more than a dozen states, including Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. In addition, Aqua America provides water or wastewater services to Philadelphia and in 23 other counties in Pennsylvania, or about half of the company's total customers. Despite providing these indispensable services, the stock has been in a steep downtrend under its 10- and 20-week moving averages since late September. In fact, during this time frame, the stock has shed more than 28%.Investors, however, are extremely optimistic about Aqua America's prospects. The Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio for WTR stands at 0.35 and is lower than all but 7% of the readings taken during the past 52 weeks. Should the optimists grow weary of the stock's downtrend, they could close out their long positions, creating more selling pressure on the shares. There is also ample room for downgrades, as five of the eight analysts following WTR rate it a "buy" or better. Any downgrades for WTR could spell trouble for the shares.One final concern comes from short sellers. Roughly 15.2 million WTR shares have been sold short, accounting for nearly 12% of the company's total float. If these short sellers decided to add to their winning positions, it could create a fresh round of selling pressure for the shares. To take advantage of the stock's steady downtrend, traders should look to the stock's September 17.50 put.http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/13/flowserve-aqua-water-pf-ii-in_jd_0613options_inl.html
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Watch the full film on NOWNESS.com
Technicolor Dream
Director Lisa Paclet's Spellbinding Short Launches Luisa Via Roma's Firenze4Ever Film Festival
Charismatic music director and DJ Mimi Xu, AKA Misty Rabbit, models clothes by rising fashion talents in director Lisa Paclet's short, created for the fifth edition of iconic Italian boutique Luisa Via Roma's Firenze4Ever festival, which kicks off in Florence today. Inspired by the surrealist work of influential mid-century photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, Technicolor Dream is a close collaboration between Paclet and Xu, with the latter masterminding an original score for the hypnotizing visuals. "Another reference was Piet Mondrian," explains Paclet, whose recent work includes films for Kenzo and Dior. "We built a set inspired by his paintings to frame Mimi's body in different ways." The film showcases designers from five Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week cities: Sheguang Hu (Shanghai), Michael Sontag (Berlin), Maria Escoté (Madrid), Stine Riis (Stockholm) and Charlotte Ronson (New York). A leading luxury e-commerce platform known for its on-the-pulse collections and limited-edition exclusives by revered designers such as Karl Lagerfeld, Luisa Via Roma will stock the designers from the film for the first time. "Young, up-and-coming designers represent the future of fashion," says Luisa Via Roma CEO Andrea Panconesi. "It is important to recognize this and give them a space alongside the historic fashion houses."
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One of the most exciting online platforms, Nowness constantly pushes the boundaries with new media that show cases the work of artists, designers and musicians who are renowned for their excellence and style.

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Actress Ashley Benson has blamed her hectic work schedule for prompting her split from boyfriend Ryan Good last year (13).
The Spring Breakers beauty ended her romance with the movie producer, who was responsible for bringing Justin Bieber's two documentaries to the big screen, in March (13), only to reconcile with him later in the year.
Benson has now explained they struggled to maintain a relationship because she was always away filming.
Speaking to Cosmopolitan magazine, she says, "Ryan is one of the strongest people I've met. So grounded and such a positive influence on people.
"We took a break because it was so hard. I work 20 hour days, so I'm always gone. So a lot of your relationship is on the phone and iChatting and trying to catch up."


text: The following list shows RIA's continued success in securing grants and financial support for its valuable research projects. The dedication of RIA scientists and their grantsmanship efforts have made this research possible. This section briefly describes each scientist's individual projects as well as the funding sources and the amounts dedicated to each project.


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Because central Nepal is much easier to get to than western Nepal, we have much more bedrock geochronology data from central Nepal with which to compare our detrital data (the same arguments concerning recycling from the Siwaliks applied to sample NAG-12 apply here). Figure 10 shows the outlines of the largest of the drainage basins associated with our samples from central Nepal as well as locations and 40 Ar/ 39 Ar ages of muscovites from bedrock known to us at the time of this writing. There are 152 bedrock samples, but only 86 of these are from within the Narayani basin. The bedrock samples are far from evenly distributed across the catchment and we can only assume that surface processes have done a good job of averaging the contributions from throughout the basin. At some level of detail we can imagine that sample MO-217, as analyzed, does not faithfully sample all of the bedrock in the catchment because it is biased toward larger muscovites (see preceding). Nevertheless, as shown in Figure 10 , there is nothing problematic about the detrital data in light of the bedrock data and vice versa. Because the Kathmandu-Annapurna region has been studied in such detail (thermochronology, metamorphic petrology, structural geology) the detrital muscovites from the greater Narayani basin seem to offer no additional insight other than to predict that areas within the basin yet to be investigated at the same level of scrutiny as the southern flanks of the Annapurna range are unlikely to reveal a geologic history substantially different than that already suggested for this region. Moreover, the broad consistency of the detrital data to the bedrock data in the Narayani basin (where bedrock data are abundant) gives us confidence in our ability to make broad-brush conclusions, based on detrital data, about the tectonic evolution of the Karnali basin (where bedrock data are sparse).
The final point we discuss about the new data presented here is the strong dissimilarity between the distribution of the age of muscovites from the modern Karnali drainage and the modern Narayani basin ( Fig. 3C ). These catchments are about the same size ( Table 3 ) and are adjacent to each other ( Fig. 1 ), but the ages from the Narayani basin to the east (sample MO-217) are distinctly younger than the ages from the Karnali in the west (sample NAG-12). These differences point to distinct histories of erosion in these regions.
We can consider the causes of erosion in the Himalaya over the past 20 m.y. to be of 2 end-member types. No erosion takes place absent the work of wind and water, but in any tectonically active region, such as the Himalaya, the effects of the deformation of the crust can be of equal or much greater importance; rock deformation results in changes in the elevation and relief of the surface, which in turn can influence the location and magnitude of precipitation.
Are the differences in the muscovite ages from the Karnali and the muscovites from the Narayani due to variations in influence of rock deformation (tectonics) or the influence of the work of wind and water (climate) or some combination thereof? We discuss the possible contributions of these two effects in turn.
It sounds bizarre, but, Schneider writes, the jury's still out on whether any artificial intelligence is capable of self-awareness. Simply put, we know so little about the neurological basis for consciousness; it's almost impossible to predict what ingredients might go into replicating it artificially.
"I don't see any good reason to believe an artificial superintelligence couldn't possess consciousness, but it's important to identify the possibility," said Schneider.
Still, Schneider feels the assertion that artificial life simply can't possess consciousness is losing ground.
"I believe the brain is inherently computational—we already have computational theories that describe aspects of consciousness, including working memory and attention," Schneider said. "Given a computational brain, I don't see any good argument that silicon, instead of carbon, can't be a excellent medium for experience."
You don't spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don't really want to kill the goldfish, either."
I hope she's right. Somehow, the notion of a galaxy teeming with soulless supercomputers is way creepier than introspective, WALL-E-like beings, or dry, sardonic Qs.
"It's super creepy," Schneider agrees. Indeed, Schneider, who
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, urges that humans should reflect deeply on this potential consequence of cognitive enhancement.
The concept of superintelligent alien AI still sounds very speculative. And it is. But that doesn't mean it's not worth consideration. Indeed, expanding our purview of alien intelligence may help us identify life's fingerprints in the cosmos. "So far, we've pointed antennas at stars that might have planets that might have breathable atmospheres and oceans and so forth," Shostak told me. "But if we're correct that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is artificial, then does it have to live on a planet with an ocean?"
It's a bit of a mind-bender to think that habitable worlds may hold false promise when it comes to advanced alien life, but that seems to be Shostak's conclusion.
"All artificial life forms would need is raw materials," he said. "They might be in deep space, hovering around a star, or feeding off a black hole's energy at the center of the galaxy." (That last idea has seen its way into a number of science fiction novels, including works by
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Which is to say, they could be, essentially, anywhere.
Begging a final question: How might superintelligent aliens view us? Will our cosmic cousins see us as nothing more than convenient biofuel, a la the Matrix? Or do they study us quietly from afar, abiding by a Star Trek-esque maxim of non-interference? Schneider doubts either. In fact, she reckons superintelligent aliens couldn't really care less about us.
"If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn't be here," said Schneider. "My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they're not going to want to contact us."
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One of our big events for the Spring semester is the Career Fair on the Fox. Even if you can't recite your elevator pitch forward and backward, your company research is all prepared, and your resume has been scoured and no t's have been left uncrossed or i's left un-dotted, but you can still blow the Career Fair experience if you don't arrive in professional dress.
You've probably heard the saying you don't get a second chance at a first impression.
A whopping 55% of how we dress, act and walk through the door are the biggest factors of an interviewer or recruiter's first impression.
So let's get down to the first impression wardrobe do's and don'ts. Sweatpants, hoodies and sneakers are completely out of the question. Most jeans, even if they are MissMe or $200 designer jeans, aren't going to get the reaction you desire either.
Suit up. For women pantsuits, pencil or A-line skirts paired with a button down and a cardigan or blazer are key pieces. Avoid anything too tight. Even if you want to show off your amazing figure, you can flatter your assets without flashing your assets. Keep it conservative with an appropriate neckline and hemline. Add a pop of color with a scarf or simple statement jewelry.
Men should also wear a suit or pair dress pants with a button down and a sweater vest. A tie or bow tie is always appropriate as long as the pattern and print aren't distracting to the interviewer. Of course you want to make a memorable impression, but charm them with your knowledge and wit without searing that loud ugly tie into their brain.
The best part is that it's extremely affordable. These two display outfits cost under $10 each thanks to the local Fox Valley Thrift Shop. Affordable, professional, stylish and memorable makes for a lasting impression. Not the best at coming up with fashionable combinations or feeling fashion an savvy challenged? No problem! Check out sites with professional dress ideas like Pinterest. Many pins can lead you to fashion blogs and offer endless ideas to keep you looking and feeling sharp.


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Henrik Sedin, Ryan Kesler missing as Canucks prepare for Blues
Availability of top two centres among questions surrounding team's lineup
Ryan Kesler (left) and Henrik Sedin, celebrating a Kesler goal during a Oct. 22, 2013 NHL game against the New York Islanders in Uniondale, N.Y., were both absent from Vancouver Canucks practice on Monday as the team prepares for the resumption of play after the Olympic break with a visit from the St. Louis Blues on Wednesday.
Photograph by: Bruce Bennett , Getty Images
VANCOUVER — This much we know: the Vancouver Canucks will begin their post-Olympic stretch run on Wednesday night against the St. Louis Blues.
Just who will be in the lineup that night is not nearly so clear.
Captain Henrik Sedin was absent from Monday's practice for personal reasons and will also miss Tuesday's practice. Coach John Tortorella said he hopes Sedin will be back for Wednesday night's game (7:30 p.m., Sportsnet Pacific, Team 1040).
Second-line centre Ryan Kesler returned from the Sochi Olympics with some kind of hand injury and was sent Monday for tests. Tortorella said Kesler is day to day.
Defenceman Kevin Bieksa, recovering from a right foot injury, did not skate Monday. Tortorella said the team decided to give Bieksa a day's rest in hopes he will be able to play against the Blues.
Fellow defenceman Chris Tanev (hand) almost certainly won't play, while winger Alex Burrows (hand) could join the main group for Tuesday's practice.
"The numbers are getting lower," a frustrated Tortorella said after Monday's practice. "We had 12 (players) today."
They'll need 20 for Wednesday's game. Olympians Dan Hamhuis, Roberto Luongo, Daniel Sedin and Alex Edler all returned to Vancouver on Monday and — knock on wood — will be available to play against the Blues.
The Canucks did call up centre Kellan Lain from the AHL's Utica Comets on Monday and may have to summon more reinforcements depending on the status of Henrik Sedin, Kesler and the other injured players.
Kesler spent some time at Rogers Arena on Monday morning, but was sent out for tests, including a MRI, on his right hand. Kesler is believed to have hurt it blocking a shot by Russian forward Ilya Kovalchuk in a Feb. 15 game.
"I haven't talked to Kes, we'll see how he is tomorrow," Tortorella said. "I am not overly worried about him missing a couple of days of practice. We'll still have the morning skate on Wednesday … we'll see how he is tomorrow morning."
Tortorella said head trainer Mike Burnstein sent Kesler out for tests after meeting with him on Monday.
"I think Bernie is going to put him through the whole nine yards," Tortorella said. "He is getting everything checked and we'll see what it looks like and then we'll see him tomorrow."
Bieksa worked out off the ice with skills coach Glenn Carnegie on Monday. He skated with the team in Friday's practice, started Saturday's practice but left early after experiencing soreness. The Canucks had the day off on Sunday.
"We just wanted to give him another day off," Tortorella said. "After the skate (on Saturday) he was sore and again our whole mindset is try and get him ready to play that game on Wednesday and we figured the extra day would help him. He'll be on the ice with us (Tuesday)."
Burrows and Tanev skated by themselves before Monday's practice. Tortorella said Tanev is highly doubtful for Wednesday's game, but the team is hoping Burrows could be ready.
"He could be with us tomorrow," Tortorella said of Burrows.
Tortorella and his staff are trying to make the best of what is certainly not an ideal situation, with all the missing bodies. They had a lengthy video session with the players on Monday that delayed the scheduled 11 a.m. start of practice by about 45 minutes.
"All the injured guys were in our meeting today," Tortorella said. "I thought today was a really productive day with our video … to have all the injured guys in there was important.
"It is what it is. All the teams are going through it. I think we are kind of doubled up with our injuries still, but we just have to move forward here and keep trying to prepare the best we can with the numbers that we have."
The Canucks will begin their final 22 games in 10th place in the West. If it takes 95 points to finish inside the top eight in the West, Vancouver must finish the season on a 14-4-4- run. The Canucks have lost their last seven games in regulation.
Tortorella does not want to look that far ahead.
"We have to concentrate on each day, on the points that we are trying to get across that day and keep banging away that way," he said. "And we'll see where we land come the middle of April."
The players are anxious to start playing games.
"Today's practice was the toughest so far because we had fewer bodies," said winger Tom Sestito. "I can't wait for the games. You won't hear any complaints from me about playing three in four nights."
"We have to look at it almost like a whole new mini-season for us," added centre Jordan Schroeder. "It's going to be tight right down to the end so we have to be ready and start playing playoff-type hockey right from the get-go."


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That filthy Walter Gomez turns up the heat at his monthly bathhouse themed towel party. It features the power shower show, free clothes check, and a $100 wet towel contest. Sponsored by Steamworks bathhouse in Berkeley.Read More


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A man staggered into a Minneapolis bar around 1 a.m. Sunday, and the bartender thought he was asking for a shot.
The man was actually saying he had been shot.
Luckily for the shooting victim, a 22-year-old whose name has not been released by police, Maxwell's American Pub was filled with nurses that night, the Star Tribune reported. Three different groups of nurses just happened to be inside the establishment, with a total of six nurses in all.
Psychiatric nurse Tim Carew, 40, told the Tribune that the man, who was suffering from six gunshot wounds, was "leaking blood" and that "he needed to lay down or risk going into shock."
Carew said the nurses applied pressure using bar towels and used the victim's belt to make a tourniquet. They were able to successfully slow the bleeding until paramedics arrived to transport the man to a hospital. Nurses who had gotten blood on them were later tested to make sure they had not contracted any diseases.
Maxwell's picked up the tab for all the nurses present.
The shooting had occurred at Bobby and Steve's Auto World, about a block away from Maxwell's, WCCO reported. Police told the station that shots were exchanged between two cars before a security guard joined in the fray.
According to the Star Tribune, the wounded man was not one of the shooters.
The unidentified man will reportedly survive the shooting, which EMT Kyle Murdock -- who was not involved in this incident -- says is extremely lucky, given the circumstances.
"There's a huge risk of infection when you are treating someone in a non-sterile environment," Murdock told The Huffington Post. "Obviously he would have died without intervention, but an infection from non-sterile treatment could still kill him after."


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The Compensation Office:
- Administers all Institute compensation programs and ensures that these programs are appropriate, competitive, and efficiently managed.
- Conducts and participates in a variety of surveys and other information exchanges to keep informed of salary trends in the external market.
- Manages the annual salary review process and recommends annual salary review allocations and adjustments to established salary ranges.
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When making a guitar, what wood should you use? No matter what you choose, someone will always tell you that you should've used something else. If you decide to read up on the topic on the internet, everyone has an opinion. But I wouldn't trust too many of them. The only people who can really know how a guitar will resonate depending on the wood are the people who are playing a lot of guitars day in and day out. This means luthiers, repairman, set-up technicians at guitar factories.
I make and design guitars and I need to take a lot of things into account. The type of wood is important but other things can trump this. Many people will tell you that "mahogany is the best" or "you have to use "ash" and these are safe answers to this very complex question. Yet, the tone of a guitar can be altered very dramatically by other factors.
When I first started to produce factory-made guitars in Korea, I insisted on using poplar. I owned an old 60's Mustang that I thought sounded amazing. The guitar had its original finish stripped and I could clearly see the greenish tinge that told me it was poplar (as well as the smell when sanding it). Since I knew that Fender usually used ash or alder and Gibson used mahogany, I went for the poplar thinking this would give my brand its own sonic fingerprint.
This was working fine until the guitars started getting very heavy. I asked the factory to use lighter pieces of poplar but they were still showing up heavier than normal. I decided to try other types of wood in the hopes of getting the weight down. I specified mahogany, ash, alder and basswood as well as poplar. The guitars became much lighter. Since 95% of my guitars have solid color finishes it was not always obvious what types wood were being used until I needed to do some routing for a custom job. I started noticing lots of mahogany and basswood bodies.
But to my surprise I did not notice a shift in tonality. The guitars were still sounding great and we were still getting the same great reviews. Also, at the time I was supplying the band Los Straitjackets with new guitars and they sounded just as good as ever through their old Fender Vibrolux amps.
Now, I'm not saying there is NO difference in the tonal qualities of different woods. There will always be subtle differences in different types of wood. But I also notice differences in tone when trying out two identical guitar made from the same wood, that came off the same assembly line.
I can tell you that I am not a fan of maple, it is very hard and bright, though it can be warmed up with the right pickup. And pine (from the hardware store) is a little too soft and kind of dead sounding. Any wood that is aged will always sound better. I rarely find and old solid body guitar from the sixties that I can't get a cool sound out of, no matter who made it.
But that brings me to my last point. Along with the right pickup and decent hardware, the setup is key to the sound. If the strings are not set to the perfect height a guitar can feel and sound completely dead and off. I am fanatical about my set-ups. I do 90% of all the set-ups on our DiPinto guitars and the ones I don't do I check over from head to toe. For this reason, you can find a guitar made by another company but made in the same factory as a DiPinto, and get far inferior sound quality and playability.
So if you are trying to figure out what wood to use on the guitars you plan to make, all I can tell you is that you should use the lightest and/or oldest available mahogany, alder, bass wood, poplar or ash that can be found. And if you ever decide to buy a DiPinto, you can be assured that the tone of your guitars will be killer because of any one of the light weight resonant woods we use, but also because of a great set-up, a well thought out design and great pickups!


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Organ Donation: Incentives Could Save Lives
Organ Donation: Incentives Could Save Lives
Human life is priceless, but economic incentives could help save the lives of thousands of Michigan citizens who are in desperate need of organ transplants.
Over 2,000 Michiganians will die prematurely unless they receive new kidneys, hearts, lungs, or other organs. But in 1998, there were only 825 organ donors in the state—less than half the number needed to meet the demand.
How can economics encourage more people to sign up for organ donation? Laws forbid the sale of human organs, and most people find the idea of a market for organs objectionable.
But another idea is to allow nonprofit organizations such as the American Red Cross to offer nominal payments—perhaps $25.00—to encourage more people to sign organ donor cards when renewing their driver's licenses. Currently, people who sign these cards receive nothing.
People who wished to sign out of a sense of charity could refuse the payment. Those who might not otherwise agree to donate would suddenly have a modest economic incentive to do so, making them more likely to sign the card and save a life.
Michigan could save thousands of precious lives by putting the power of incentives to work for those in need of organ transplants.
For the Mackinac Center, this is Joseph Lehman.


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American Healthcare Rant 2: Die Harder
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 12:11 pm
Post subject: American Healthcare Rant 2: Die Harder
Okay, because american healthcare has become the embarrasing topic du jour I guess it is time to yet again start blathering about it.
Read this. No seriously, read it. Read it until you feel sick.
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· The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills; the United States has
more lost productivity
and a lower average working age range than any of the other 'modernized' high-income nations such as the G8.
· Half of the uninsured people in America owe money to hospitals and a third are being pursued by collection agencies.
· Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention considered reasonable and appropriate for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who dont have health insurance are less likely to receive X-rays or consultations.
The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insurance.
Part of this is correlative to the higher risks and lifestyles of poorer demographics and part of this is certifiably due to the consequence of moral hazard models in leaving chronic and/or life threatening conditions untreated.
· Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized worlds median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
The extra spending does not provide us with anything approaching the effectiveness of non-actuarial models.
· We have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries.
· We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries.
· We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries.
· We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries.
· American life expectancy is lower than the Western average.
· Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average.
· Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations, which means that we have higher infant mortality rates than some
· Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita.
· The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per yearor close to four hundred billion dollarson health-care-related paperwork and administration. In contrast, a country like Canada spends only about three hundred dollars per capita.
· And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote:
Health insurance here has always been private and selective, and every attempt to expand benefits has resulted in a paralyzing political battle over who would be added to insurance rolls and who ought to pay for those additions.
Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas, and in the past few decades a particular idea has taken hold among prominent American economists which has also been a powerful impediment to the expansion of health insurance. The idea is known as moral hazard. Health economists in other Western nations do not share this obsession. Nor do most Americans. But moral hazard has profoundly shaped the way think tanks formulate policy and the way experts argue and the way health insurers structure their plans and the way legislation and regulations have been written. The health-care mess isnt merely the unintentional result of political dysfunction, in other words. It is also the deliberate consequence of the way in which American policymakers have come to think about insurance.
Moral hazard is the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured.
If your office gives you and your co-workers all the free Pepsi you wantif your employer, in effect, offers universal Pepsi insuranceyoull drink more Pepsi than you would have otherwise. If you have a no-deductible fire-insurance policy, you may be a little less diligent in clearing the brush away from your house. The savings-and-loan crisis of the nineteen-eighties was created, in large part, by the fact that the federal government insured savings deposits of up to a hundred thousand dollars, and so the newly deregulated S. & L.s made far riskier investments than they would have otherwise. Insurance can have the paradoxical effect of producing risky and wasteful behavior. Economists spend a great deal of time thinking about such moral hazard for good reason. Insurance is an attempt to make human life safer and more secure. But, if those efforts can backfire and produce riskier behavior, providing insurance becomes a much more complicated and problematic endeavor.
In 1968, the economist Mark Pauly argued that moral hazard played an enormous role in medicine, and, as John Nyman writes in his book The Theory of the Demand for Health Insurance, Paulys paper has become the single most influential article in the health economics literature. Nyman, an economist at the University of Minnesota, says that the fear of moral hazard lies behind the thicket of co-payments and deductibles and utilization reviews which characterizes the American health-insurance system. Fear of moral hazard, Nyman writes, also explains the general lack of enthusiasm by U.S. health economists for the expansion of health insurance coverage (for example, national health insurance or expanded Medicare benefits) in the U.S.
What Nyman is saying is that when your insurance company requires that you make a twenty-dollar co-payment for a visit to the doctor, or when your plan includes an annual five-hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar deductible, its not simply an attempt to get you to pick up a larger share of your health costs. It is an attempt to make your use of the health-care system more efficient. Making you responsible for a share of the costs, the argument runs, will reduce moral hazard
: youll no longer grab one of those free Pepsis when you arent really thirsty. Thats also why Nyman says that the notion of moral hazard is behind the lack of enthusiasm for expansion of health insurance. If you think of insurance as producing wasteful consumption of medical services, then the fact that there are forty-five million Americans without health insurance is no longer an immediate cause for alarm. After all, its not as if the uninsured never go to the doctor. They spend, on average, $934 a year on medical care. A moral-hazard theorist would say that they go to the doctor when they really have to. Those of us with private insurance, by contrast, consume $2,347 worth of health care a year. If a lot of that extra $1,413 is waste, then maybe the uninsured person is the truly efficient consumer of health care.
The moral-hazard argument makes sense, however, only if we consume health care in the same way that we consume other consumer goods, and to economists like Nyman this assumption is plainly absurd. We go to the doctor grudgingly, only because were sick. Moral hazard is overblown, the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because its free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?
For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used.
The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care.
Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didnt do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is a blunt instrument. Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful? I just went to the dermatologist to get moles checked for skin cancer. If I had had to pay a hundred per cent, or even fifty per cent, of the cost of the visit, I might not have gone. Would that have been a wise decision? I have no idea. But if one of those moles really is cancerous, that simple, inexpensive visit could save the health-care system tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention saving me a great deal of heartbreak). The focus on moral hazard suggests that the changes we make in our behavior when we have insurance are nearly always wasteful. Yet, when it comes to health care, many of the things we do only because we have insurancelike getting our moles checked, or getting our teeth cleaned regularly, or getting a mammogram or engaging in other routine preventive careare anything but wasteful and inefficient. In fact, they are behaviors that could end up saving the health-care system a good deal of money.
Sered and Fernandopulle tell the story of Steve, a factory worker from northern Idaho, with a grotesque looking left handwhat looks like a bone sticks out the side. When he was younger, he broke his hand. The doctor wanted to operate on it, he recalls. And because I didnt have insurance, well, I was like I aint gonna have it operated on. The doctor said, Well, I can wrap it for you with an Ace bandage. I said, Ahh, lets do that, then.
Steve uses less health care than he would if he had insurance, but thats not because he has defeated the scourge of moral hazard. Its because instead of getting a broken bone fixed he put a bandage on it.
"The Moral Hazard Myth"
"Uninsured in America"
Starr Sered and Fernandopulle interviewed a wide range of uninsured Americans with many levels of education, including graduate degrees. Many were employed at the time of their interviews and some had the opportunity to purchase insurance, but for amounts that would significantly reduce their take-home pay, making it unaffordable.
Others could not work because of untreated or under-treated health care issues.
Still others had been laid off after plant closings, but their chances of securing employment again if the economy improves are slim due to health conditions that have been exacerbated with lack of care.
They also demonstrate that adhering to the work ethic guarantees neither health insurance nor steady work and income.
The final chapter of the book outlines suggestions that have been made for universal health coverage in America, but there is no easy solution. The authors argue that the current system for the poor is not economically sound. Without access to preventative care, problems worsen until there is no choice except to visit the emergency room or receive other exorbitantly priced treatment, which may be paid for by Medicaid or may never be paid. They contend that any feasible solution must sever the link between paid employment and insurance and must provide a minimal level of health care for all Americans, much as we provide a minimal level of education via the public schools. They argue that not only is this a humane way to treat citizens, but it is much more cost-effective than the current system.
Now, to take some other stuff into consideration!
One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.
Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.
The revelation that the health plan had cancellation goals and bonuses comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.
In a number of respects, this disparity between health insurance and health care comes from the fact that everyone gets sick, will age, and die. At some point in their life, every insured person will cost an insurance company money. Insurance companies cant make much profit on human health care, unless they exclude or limit people from coverage and benefits. Otherwise, premiums arent profit centers, they are just pre-payments for health care we know well need in the future.
To increase profits, insurance policies with benefit limits are commonplace, and no benefits are paid if those limits are exceeded, regardless of needs. You get a debilitating illness, such as cancer, and you receive a maximum payment from the insurance company that is a fraction of the total medical costs. It's as if you were a car and had reached your Blue Book value; you're declared totaled. From there, you pay the full cost of continued treatment, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. For people with health insurance, this is one of the main causes of bankruptcy: people have to use up their savings and sell their homes in order to pay uncovered medical costs.
GASP AT DISCOVERING OUR CARE RANKINGS IN THE INTERNATIONAL SPHERE! (spoiler: they suck)
(CNN) -- An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report.
American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.
Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.
"The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn rate is higher than any of those countries," said the annual State of the World's Mothers report.
On Feb. 3, Joyce Elkins filled a prescription for a two-week supply of nitrogen mustard, a decades-old [URL="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/cancer/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"]cancer[/URL] drug used to treat a rare form of lymphoma. The cost was $77.50.
On Feb. 17, Ms. Elkins, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in Georgetown, Tex., returned to her pharmacy for a refill. This time, following a huge increase in the wholesale price of the drug, the cost was $548.01. ...
The increase has stunned doctors, who say it starkly illustrates two trends in the pharmaceutical industry: the soaring price of cancer medicines and
the tendency for those prices to have little relation to the cost of developing or making the drugs.
, for example, has indicated it will effectively double the price of its colon cancer drug Avastin, to about $100,000, when Avastin's use is expanded to breast and lung cancer patients. As with Avastin, nothing about nitrogen mustard is changing but the price.
But people who analyze drug pricing say they see the Mustargen situation as emblematic of an industry trend of basing drug prices on something other than the underlying costs. After years of defending high prices as necessary to cover the cost of research or production, industry executives increasingly point to the intrinsic value of their medicines as justification for prices.
Last year, in his book "A Call to Action," Henry A. McKinnell, the chairman of Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, wrote that drug prices were not driven by research spending or production costs.
"A number of factors go into the mix" of pricing, he wrote. "Those factors consider cost of business, competition, patent status, anticipated volume, and, most important, our estimation of the income generated by sales of the product."
In some drug categories, such as cholesterol-lowering treatments, many drugs compete, keeping prices relatively low.
But when a medicine does not have a good substitute, its maker can charge almost any price.
In 2003, Abbott Laboratories raised the price of Norvir, an AIDS drug introduced in 1996, from $54 to $265 a month. AIDS groups protested, but Abbott refused to rescind the increase.
And once a company sets a price, government agencies, private insurers and patients have little choice but to pay it. The Food & Drug Administration does not regulate prices, and Medicare is banned from considering price in deciding whether to cover treatments.
Two years ago, Tracy Pierce's life changed dramatically when he was diagnosed with kidney cancer.
"I have no treatment. Three months has gone by and I haven't had any treatment," Tracy Pierce told KMBC's Jim Flink in May 2005.
When Flink talked to Tracy Pierce, his cancer was attacking his body. Despite being fully insured, every treatment his doctors sought for him was denied by his insurance provider. First-Health Coventry deemed the treatments were either not a medical necessity or experimental.
"I don't know what else to do but just wait," Tracy Pierce said last May.
As he waited, his doctors appealed again and again, including a 27-page appeal spelling out that Tracy Pierce would die without care. Coventry dismissed each request.
Tirhas Habtegiris was an East African immigrant and only 27 when she died Monday afternoon.
She'd been on a respirator at Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano for 25 days.
"They handed me this letter on December 1st. and they said, we're going to give you 10 days so on the 11th day, we're going to pull it out," said her brother Daniel Salvi.
Salvi was stunned to get this hand-delivered notice invoking a complicated and rarely used Texas law where a doctor is "not obligated to continue" medical treatment "medically inappropriate" when care is not beneficial.
Even though her body was being ravaged by cancer, this family says Tirhas still responded and
was conscious.
She was waiting one person.
"She wanted to get her mom over here or to get to her mom so she could die in her mom's arms," says her cousin Meri Tesfay.
In the Treatment of Diabetes,
Success Often Does Not Pay
With much optimism, Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan opened its new diabetes center in March 1999. Miss America, Nicole Johnson Baker, herself a diabetic, showed up for promotional pictures, wearing her insulin pump.
In one photo, she posed with a man dressed as a giant foot - a comical if dark reminder of the roughly 2,000 largely avoidable diabetes-related amputations in New York City each year. Doctors, alarmed by the cost and rapid growth of the disease, were getting serious.
At four hospitals across the city, they set up centers that featured a new model of treatment. They would be boot camps for diabetics, who struggle daily to reduce the sugar levels in their blood. The centers would teach them to check those levels, count calories and exercise with discipline, while undergoing prolonged monitoring by teams of specialists.
But seven years later, even as the number of New Yorkers with Type 2 diabetes has nearly doubled, three of the four centers, including Beth Israel's, have closed.
They did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care,
in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.
Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.
Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications.
Not surprising, as the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes has grown, more than 100 dialysis centers have opened in the city.
It's almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them,
" said Dr. Matthew E. Fink, a former president of Beth Israel.
Patients in the United States reported higher rates of medical errors and more disorganized doctor visits and out-of-pocket costs than people in Canada, Britain and three other developed countries, according to a survey released on Thursday.
Thirty-four percent of U.S. patients received wrong medication, improper treatment or incorrect or delayed test results during the last two years, the Commonwealth Fund found.
Thirty percent of Canadian patients reported similar medical errors, followed by 27 percent of those in Australia, 25 percent in New Zealand, 23 percent in Germany and 22 percent in Britain, the health care foundation said.
"Driven up by relatively high medication and lab or test errors, at 34 percent, the spread between the United States and the countries with the lowest error rates was wide," Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of Commonwealth Fund
Now, keep all these in mind when deciding which solution for health care is the most 'appropriate.'
These all act as a
brushing on the surface
of the issue of core cases for demonstrating what passes as acceptable under our current 'system.' It doesn't even go into any real depth; it's just that the evidence against a private system are so numerous that I can fill your screen with words that just hint at the various arguments you can make in favor of adopting the succesful system used by
all other modern nations.
These stories, and the umpteen billion others like them, are the start since they analyze the means by which a for-profit system manages
at the increasing cost of measurable health benefit.
Our model is not used by any other modernized nation in the entire world. It is incredibly surpassed in efficiency and effectiveness by every other high-income nation, to a ridiculous, unacceptable degree. The kicker is that our system is also more expensive than theirs, and we hate ours, and it causes people to suffer and die needlessly.
Some other issues to take into consideration:
The most important doctor in society, the most important doctor you will ever have, is the family doctor. The GP who knows your weight, your blood pressure, complains when you smoke, all of that. As has been noted, they make a decent salary but nothing special. They're in line with what European doctors make.
Until you factor in malpractice insurance, which has been increasing its rates about 20% a year for the past decade or more, while doctor salaries have not kept in line. On account of this, the take-home pay of these doctors most critically associated with health and well-being is going down. (
A perfect example of how disastrous this trend is is to look at New York City hospitals' malpractice insurance, which has gone up 147% in five years, to the point where they are shutting down obstetrics divisions.
The end result of all this is that doctors are being chased into lucrative sub-fields in order to maintain their lifestyle. They have bills to pay, but under our current system, doctors are not paid to make people well, they are paid to perform procedures. Even worse, they are only really paid for the procedures they didn't have to perform on people who cannot pay. Many doctors, to maximize their income, are learning to perform the most expensive procedures possible, and they are competing to get into fields where they don't have to do work that they won't get paid for.
If they paid doctors to make people well, you'd have a lot more GP's, who are the ones on the front lines actually doing this. Instead, the 'winners' in the current system are carving out transplant hearts and vacuuming out fat and stapling stomachs and crowding quickly into any and all available fields where you don't have to do shit for anyone who can't pay, and thus, are not forced to accept the poor people of society as a financial liability. Since medical professionals are all crowding these optional procedure fields as fast as possible, prices for these services are going down. It's not a demonstration of how uninfluenced competition is working to our benefit in some fields as much as it it is another hilarious symptom of a collapsing medical system.
Cosmetic surgeons and the like are the 'winners' of our current system. They do completely optional and expensive procedures, only for people who pay out of pocket, they are not forced to work through thieving bureaucratic intermediaries, they are not forced by financially 'unfortunate' policies to care for those who cannot pay, and despite being under the catchall term of a medical profession, they're a little different -- they are actually all but irrelevant to our general health. They cater only to those who have the excess wealth to spend on optional procedures.
The end result is that the government has already been forced to bribe doctors with taxpayer money to remain as essentially skeleton crews in necessary medical fields which HAVE to be staffed (city hospitals, etc) but nearly NO competent doctor would stay in business in if they were forced to rely upon the profit model. Just about every single top doc in places like North Dakota or Arkansas is essentially bribed by the government with huge amounts of supplemental income to not leave. It's another example of how we're trying inefficiently to sneak in socialized solutions to float the broken moral hazard model and still somehow pretend, for the benefit of some schmucks, that it's seaworthy of its own accord.
There's also another issue and it becomes evident when you ask seniors what form of healthcare they want. The big old socialized medical care program called Medicare, known alternately as being 'the most popular program in America' and 'the politically untouchable juggernaut.' Socialism, right here in the heart of the dear old U.S. because private medical care wouldn't touch the issue of care for the elderly.
Why? The elderly have the same sort of issue which leaves orphan diseasers to sit in a corner and die. There is no way to make taking care of old people profitable. Good thing that private insurers get to bypass the issue of maintenance of the elderly.
Thanks, Medicare, for being the big bad socialized medical program that makes 'private' health coverage remotely feasible!
A free market health care system
work but only if nothing forces our hospitals and care networks to do anything for those who cannot pay upfront. In a free market system, you either pay or you don't. If you can't pay, you don't get the service. In the case of medical care, if you don't pay, you die. It's tough, but it's the only way the system can work. Right now, medical providers HAVE to treat people regardless of their ability to pay, in life-threatening situations. This fucks the entire system right up. Because uninsured people don't get stuff looked at when it's minor (because they can't afford to pay), they let things get worse, go to the ER, where they either die or live, and in any event run up huge bills. If the hospital can't get that person to pay, they have to make up for the shortfall elsewhere, or go out of business. So everyone else pays higher rates for things. Which FORCES a kind of socialism on the system anyway.
In order to be a good capitalist, you have to kill grandma. If you cannot pay during a life-threatening ordeal, you
have to die.
If you don't practice this then all you get is incredibly shitty socialism where everyone ends up absorbing all the costs for the old and the poor anyway even though we're not giving them effective care, just 'necessary' care. Kill grandma. Kill grandma kill grandma and squint real hard and pretend that the mere existence of paltry private charity that will save some people absolves you of any guilt for supporting a system that will leave scores more out on the streets in front of hospitals to die. The problem here is that people's will to actually follow through with their "free market will save the Universe" rhetoric is not strong when faced with an uninsured sick person. Especially an uninsured sick OLD person (who tend to vote in large numbers, and whose population is always increasing) So we start building slipshod systems like Medicare and Medicaid. Kill grandma, otherwise you're a shitty capitalist. You're welcome to say that the free market is the solution to our current woes but you can't pretend that it comes without some extraordinarily worrying sacrifices. If you don't have the balls to kill grandma, then you're going to have to swallow your pride and your 'the free market will save the world' bullshit and stick up for a socialist model.
Well, for starters, if you honestly believe that our system is better than a universal health care scheme, or that for reasons of size we would be 'unable' to institute effective universal care here in America, okay, you're being retarded and that's pretty much the long and short of it. The former argument is counter-evidenced by all reasonable metrics, so pursuit of that chain of logic is dissonance with reality of the finest sort; the latter argument is a bald premise evidenced by nothing. Both are blatantly untrue. It's outright stupid to believe them right now.
I care very little about both of those arguments, as they are desperate attempts to prop up an argument that is continuing a guaranteed trek into irrelevance. In the long term, there is no question as to whether or not we will be switching to universal health care. We will. The reason why it is so inevitable is because the current model is collapsing on itself due to issues of medical payment crisis. Hospitals are required to care for people in immediate medical crisis, and it is impossible to make a number of vital civil functions profitable or sustainable, market wise, given that requirement.
The end result is that the government has to prop up urban and rural hospitals with a shitty socialist scheme. As noted, we bribe doctors with taxpayer money to keep them in areas which would otherwise not have doctors. We unabashedly prop the system up. We're just doing this in shitty ways in order to appease the people who want to maintain an illusion that the system works without socialism. This is causing the whole structure to collapse in on it.
To give you a tiny hint about how dire the situation is in America: bankruptcy due to medical crisis remains the single largest cause of bankruptcy in the United States, even during the present time period where the big news is about a financial catastrophe that is causing defaults all over the place.
You read that right: the medical crisis which we've been dealing with for over a decade now has over that timeframe been causing problems still worse than any fallout that the financial crisis has yet achieved. In addition, the financial crisis will throw more and more people into the uninsured category, increasing the costs that the dwindling quantity of insured people have to bear, causing more people to become uninsured. Wow, holy shit, death spiral much?
It's retarded. It's unsustainable. America will have universal health care in our lifetime. And the people who are actively working to prevent this are bankrupt and arguably
morally negligent
in their quest to perpetuate a broken, terrible, stupid ideology. They must be opposed along every step.
Support for raising taxes to provide universal coverage has already achieved a large plurality. As more and more people move to support of universal coverage from out of opposition and from being undecided, it will achieve a majority within the year.
If you are American, it's your duty to press for universal health care as hard as you can. It's about the most important issue facing us as citizens. Help make the transition as prompt as we can manage. And, above all, never ever
vote for someone who wants to stop universal health care.
If you are not American, it's your duty to continue to mock the
out of us and our stupid, worthless medical system, so that we get the idea.
Last edited by Sam on Tue Mar 10, 2009 12:52 pm; edited 2 times in total
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 12:27 pm
Post subject:
What is the point of this thread?
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 12:31 pm
Post subject:
andrew wrote:
What is the point of this thread?
Rehashing and collecting my full argument for universal health care out of a thread that has it as a branch discussion so that it can get its own topic.
Working to draw the argument to the fore as much as possible now that it has become big news under the new administration.
Firmly restating support now that it has become a national priority to overhaul the system.
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Mini J
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Location: Vancouver, BC
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 12:39 pm
Post subject:
tl,dr: Sam hates freedom.
Who needs a signature?
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Location: under the bed
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 1:04 pm
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and he's got all the evidence and points in one place, for easy reference. so when someone start on about how american healthcare is the best in the world, we can point them here (rudy guiliani reads this forum, right?) when someone says insurance companies are not the problem, it's all the rapacious doctors, we can point them here. when someone starts on about how, yeah it would be nice, but the country can't possibly afford it, we can point them here.
sam, you should email a copy of this to every member of congress. the ones who really need to read it won't, of course....but maybe someone in their office will.
our current system is seriously scary. i am extremely lucky - i work for a very large employer which considers health insurance one of the essential benefits, so i have it at a reasonable cost to me (my employer covers most of the costs, and because if our size, the rates are pretty much the same for everyone). i have a couple of potentially serious existing conditions; if i had to get insurance for myself, i'm not sure i could find a company that would cover me, at least not for a price i could afford. and that's stupid. although the conditions i have could cause me considerable suffering and an early death, they aren't really a problem. because i have always had insurance, and always did things like regular physicals, all the conditions were caught early. all are manageable with medication. yes, the medication costs something - but not as much as the things that would happen if i were not medicated. and my conditions are (alas) not at all uncommon. so theoretically, the volume of sales should be enough to keep the price down. (i have no idea whether that happens, however - i think most of mine now have generics, but i don't know what the proprietary ones are costing).
but right now, there are too many people with their eyes fixed firmly on the profits - like the insurance companies, and the pharmaceuticals. and because they make so much profit, they can pay many many expensive lobbyists, who have been doing whatever they have been doing to persuade lawmakers that the current system is the only possible one, and everything else will lead to the utter destruction of america as we know it.
....which i guess it would, in some ways. it's just that some things need to be destroyed to make the world better.
aka: neverscared!
a flux of vibrant matter
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 1:08 pm
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I guess my point is: are there really any people left on the board that oppose NHC for any of the reasons refuted by this post?
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 1:30 pm
Post subject:
andrew wrote:
I guess my point is: are there really any people left on the board that oppose NHC for any of the reasons refuted by this post?
Well we'll all be able to find out when they post a dissenting opinion.
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 1:34 pm
Post subject:
andrew wrote:
I guess my point is: are there really any people left on the board that oppose NHC for any of the reasons refuted by this post?
Yes, but even if there were none, the post is unambiguously not just directed towards them as an audience and is also for supporters of UHC for
very directly stated reasons.
In addition: post also addresses statements that were made just this week by person(s) on board who dismiss the viability of UHC, soooooooo
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 1:44 pm
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I'm having trouble articulating why, exactly, this thread irritates me so deeply. It just seems like yet another excuse for rah rah rah-ing over an issue that's dead and buried.
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:02 pm
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Except your country still has the system, so it's not dead and buried.
Ironically, Halen's one of the few people here I wouldn't worry about terrifying my friends and family. In my head he ends every real life conversation stroking his chin and saying, "well yes, that sounds reasonable."
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Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:02 pm
Post subject:
andrew wrote:
I'm having trouble articulating why, exactly, this thread irritates me so deeply. It just seems like yet another excuse for rah rah rah-ing over an issue that's dead and buried.
You did say you had heard intelligent arguments against universal health care though. I'd love to hear them. Please note I'm not being sarcastic or condescending or trying to be a general dickhead. I just really want to hear the other side. I know loads of conservatives that tell me daily what socialism is going to do to us but most of them aren't exactly what I'd call... reasonable.
I couldnt think of anything smart to say.
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Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 11378
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:03 pm
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Your irritation to the thread has been duly noted. In the grander sphere of things, though, this issue is far from dead or buried and is in fact approaching greater immediate prominence than it has held in over a decade. The timing is ripe.
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Joined: 13 Jul 2006
Posts: 4495
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:08 pm
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Darkman wrote:
You did say you had heard intelligent arguments against universal health care though. I'd love to hear them. Please note I'm not being sarcastic or condescending or trying to be a general dickhead. I just really want to hear the other side. I know loads of conservatives that tell me daily what socialism is going to do to us but most of them aren't exactly what I'd call... reasonable.
Sorry, no: the responses immediately following mine in the last thread demonstrated pretty clearly that most people here are incapable of distinguishing "bad argument" from "argument I don't agree with," and that failing is pretty much inherent in
who claims to never have heard a good argument against NHC.
picturesofsky wrote:
Except your country still has the system, so it's not dead and buried.
The sun is still in the sky in Seattle, but I know it's going to set; I can even reasonably predict what time it will happen. I consider the issue of the sun setting dead and buried.
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Joined: 12 May 2008
Posts: 3072
Location: England
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:13 pm
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On a whim, I typed "universal healthcare" into facebook and was faced with 20 groups, all of whom buzzed with irritated arguments from people who hated the idea and equated it with communism. Clearly this kind of argument needs to happen with them. Just because you've decided it's right, doesn't mean everyone has.
Sadly, Sam's post is ... really long. It's going to very much fall victim to tl;dr.
And no-one has to preach universal healthcare to me. I work for it
Ironically, Halen's one of the few people here I wouldn't worry about terrifying my friends and family. In my head he ends every real life conversation stroking his chin and saying, "well yes, that sounds reasonable."
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Joined: 13 Jul 2006
Posts: 4495
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:16 pm
Post subject:
picturesofsky wrote:
On a whim, I typed "universal healthcare" into facebook and was faced with 20 groups, all of whom buzzed with irritated arguments from people who hated the idea and equated it with communism. Clearly this kind of argument needs to happen with them.
Well, no, it doesn't, because this argument can't address the points that most of those people have. If someone views NHC as a negative despite its potential benefits because it's gov't sanctioned redistribution of wealth, there is no possible argument because they are
in their assessment even if you disagree with their conclusion.
Last edited by andrew on Mon Mar 09, 2009 2:17 pm; edited 1 time in total
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SCMC hosts a Roundtable each semester that encourages participants to share and learn from each other. Topics are identified through sponsor input, industry trends and best practice gaps. Agendas often include Industry and/or Academic presentations with Q&A, topical panels and group discussion. Past topics include:
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Air Rescue
Air Rescue is an exclusive odd job to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories activated through an Air Ambulance. This odd job is different to the other ones in the previous Grand Theft Auto games. In this one Victor Vance, the protagonist has to save patients by picking them up with a winch below the helicopter. After passing 15 levels, the mission is completed and the player's health will go up by 50%. The mission cannot be activated until the player has completed the mission From Zero To Hero as the Air Ambulance does not appear until the eastern island has been unlocked.


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Henry Hauls Down Yet Another Crown As Texas A&M Rolls To Second Straight Men's And Women's Titles
June 12, 2010
-- SIDEBAR: From Olympic Rings To NCAA Gold
By Doug Binder
Special to NCAA.com
EUGENE, Ore. - Legendary college track coach Pat Henry and his Texas A&M Aggies swept the men's and women's team titles for the second year in a row on Saturday at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track and Field Championships at Hayward Field.
Henry now has 19 outdoor team titles and his latest two were masterfully executed.
The Texas A&M men won the final event on the track, the 4x400 relay, to edge Florida by a single point, 55-54. The Gators finished third in the relay and were .21 seconds behind second-place Mississippi State.
But even after that race was over, it took the official results of the long jump to sort out the overall winner.
The Aggies were nearly flawless on the women's side, securing 22 points in the 200 meters on the final day and finishing with 72 to beat hometown favorite Oregon, second with 57.
Texas A&M also won the 4x100 relay and finished second to Oregon by a whisker in the 4x400.
"It's about team efforts, ups and downs, and it's about responding to ups and downs," Henry said. "All year long, this has been a unique group of guys and women."
The women lost Natasha Ruddock and Gabby Mayo - big projected scorers - to injury. And still, the Aggies found a way to score more points than any team has at the NCAA meet since 2002.
"We have so much talent on this team," said Porscha Lucas, who won the 200 and ran the second leg on the victorious 4x100 relay. "If we're losing one (athlete) we still have three more (ready) to go."
The first challenge for the Texas A&M sprinters was to turn quickly from their 4x100 relay win and prepare for the 200 meters final just 38 minutes later on a cool, gray morning in Eugene.
"It was tough, but it was manageable," Lucas said. "We look at the 4-by-1 as a warmup, so it got our bodies warm and ready for the 200."
Lucas won that event in 22.83 seconds, while teammate Jeneba Tarmoh was second in 22.92. Dominique Duncan was fifth in 23.48. All three of them had been part of the short relay.
Vashti Thomas added a sixth place finish in the 100-meter hurdles and Hillary Pustka was sixth in the javelin.
In the 4x400 relay, with the team win safely secured for the Aggies, Oregon's Keshia Baker was able to hold off Texas A&M's Jessica Beard for the win, by .03 seconds. The Ducks won their first relay title in 3:28.54.
For the A&M men, the title seemed like it might have been lost with a botched handoff between Tran Howell and Gerald Phiri in the first exchange of the 4x100 meters.
Florida, with Jeff Demps on the anchor leg, got the win in 39.04 seconds, while the Aggies took a zero.
That result put the Gators in front by two points, 38-36.
Curtis Mitchell and Phiri placed second and eighth, respectively, in the 200 meters to score a total of nine points for the Aggies. And the 4x400 relay win lifted the team to the title.
"It's my first time to get this championship so I am really excited," said Demetrius Pinder, who ran the second leg on the winning relay. "It's not a one-man thing - we all have worked hard to get this title."
In the long jump, which wrapped up about the same time as the final relay, Florida's Christian Taylor was fourth. Taylor also ran on the 4x400 relay for the Gators. Texas A&M had a pair of jumpers in the field but neither of them scored.
Henry has coached 14 championship teams in the 28 years the event has existed for women. It was his fifth men's victory.
Fifteen of his 19 team championships came during his tenure at LSU (1987-2004).
Henry is the only coach to sweep the men's and women's titles in the same year and he has now done it four times (1989 and 1990 at LSU; 2009 and 2010 at Texas A&M).


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Eva Longoria has been unveiled as a co-chair of President Barack Obama's inauguration committee.
The former Desperate Housewives star tirelessly campaigned for the leader's re-election prior to the vote last month (Nov12), even speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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In a post on her Twitter.com page, the thrilled star writes, "Excited and honoured to co-chair the Obama inaugural in 2013! Will I see you in DC?"
Obama's public inauguration ceremony will take place in Washington, D.C. on 21 January (13) and marks the official start of the President's second term in office.


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The Obama Administration is currently working with the international community to relieve Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad of his chemical weapons stockpile. Of course, there's ample reason for pessimism. Even if American and Russian officials were to work in perfect harmony, fully ridding Assad of his entire arsenal in the middle of a civil war will be difficult, complicated, and likely impossible.
The Syrian crisis speaks to the broader challenge of containing anti-American regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction. While America pursues all available diplomatic options for curbing these threats, we must also possess the military capabilities to protect the nation in case diplomacy fails.
The most effective military technology for combating the mounting WMD threat is missile defense. The United States must continue to support these systems to protect its homeland. America has been the world leader in missile defense for more than 30 years.The first major breakthrough came with the Patriot system, first used in the Persian Gulf War. The Patriot boasts over 2,500 successful tests. It's used by over a dozen American allies, including several in the Middle East, whose leaders watch warily as the Iranian nuclear program moves forward. This is just one component of America's missile defense infrastructure.
The alarming rate of Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb underscores how wrong the Obama administration was to abandon our allies and scrap the planned missile defense shield program for Eastern Europe in 2009. That system's chief purpose was to deter the Iranian nuclear threat. Without it, the hardliners in Iran can still make plausible threats against America and its allies. North Korea's nuclear arsenal presents an even more serious problem. Satellite images released in September reveal that the country might be close to bringing its Yongbyon plutonium production reactor back on line. The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that the country could already have a nuclear weapon small enough to fit atop a missile.
Meanwhile, the threat of terrorists exploiting the resources of a weak or chaotic government like Egypt's is very real. These radical non-state actors need just a single bomb attached to a single missile to present a serious threat to the United States. And Assad can't be taken as an honest broker. In the event that he does agree to hand over his chemical weapons, it is unlikely we can confirm that all will be in custody. Witness the near-endless discovery of additional WMD facilities in Libya after their WMD disarmament 2003—and that wasn't in the middle of a civil war. The key lesson from the last decade is that preventing hostile actors from obtaining and using the world's most destructive weapons isn't always possible.
In a world where more and more of our enemies can access WMDs, keeping the United States and its allies safe from a cataclysmic attack demands greater ingenuity and vigilance. Missile defense systems can play a crucial role in efforts to combat these threats.
Michael James Barton served as the deputy director of Middle East policy at the Pentagon from 2006 through 2009 and is currently a director at ARTIS Research.


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Source: David Zahniser / Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles reached a benchmark half a century ago when the City Council's first African American was appointed to represent the area then known as South Central.
Gilbert Lindsay, a former cotton field worker and city janitor, was chosen in 1963 to fill a vacant seat in the 9th Council District, which covered part of South Los Angeles. The appointment helped make "The Great 9th," as Lindsay took to calling it, a hub of black political clout.
Two generations later, with the seat open and the March 5 election approaching, the area that gave birth to historic South Central Avenue and the city's black middle-class culture has a far different political landscape. It is nearly 80% Latino.Tiendas and carnicerias line its boulevards. And for the first time since the hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement, voters in the coming months could elect a council member who is not black.
What that might mean, and whether it matters, has been a whispered topic in the campaign to replace CouncilwomanJan Perry, who is leaving after 12 years.
To read this article in its entirety visit the Los Angeles Times.


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David Caldwell's best-laid plans aren't long for the football season, according to NFL Media analyst Charles Davis.
The Jacksonville Jaguars general manager declared earlier this week that the plan for No. 3 overall pick Blake Bortles is to sit the rookie quarterback this season so he can learn behind veteran Chad Henne. But Davis sees a change of heart ahead for Caldwell, and not one begotten by injury.
Davis simply thinks Bortles will change their minds.
"I'm going with the upset. I'm saying (Bortles plays) Week 1. Listen, he's getting the full offseason. He'll be in Jacksonville all the time. Home, in Oviedo, Fla., is just two hours away, so the homesickness thing really is not going to kick in," Davis said on NFL Network's "Path to the Draft". "He's going to be immersing himself in the playbook, that's what he did at UCF. He's going to be that kind of guy. I think his play will come to the front, and at some point the staff in Jacksonville is going to look at each other and say, 'Who are we kidding? Let's just go with the kid right now.'"
Analyst Daniel Jeremiah didn't foresee a season-long incubation for Bortles, either, suggesting a Bortles debut in Week 7 would set a likely matchup of first-round quarterbacks in Bortles against Cleveland's Johnny Manziel. Manziel will compete against veteran Brian Hoyer.
If Bortles starts the season, he'll draw a road matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 1.
And if he's lucky, rookie wide receivers Marqise Lee and Allen Robinson will be ready to reinvigorate a dismal Jaguars receiving corps.
Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter @ChaseGoodbread.